Adventure!

Adventure! is a pulpy action game set in the mid-1920s of Earth where players play slightly above average humans pushing the bounds of science, exploration and humanity.  For my take it provides the timeframe of Call of Cthulhu but instead of a theme of incomprehensible cosmic horror we get a tone of hopeful optimism about the future.  It's all the 3rd part of the Aeon Universe trilogy of games from White Wolf.  The book has a large section in the beginning filled with short stories that do a great job at conveying the atmosphere and themes that Adventure! is aiming for as well as giving some background to the game.  I found this part to be a very quick and entertaining read.  This flows rather seamlessly into providing the setting of the game including locations worldwide and major organizations.

Character creation feels quite similar to other White Wolf storyteller systems.  Characters in Adventure! are on the lower end of the power scale so I suspect some of the inherent problems with the Storyteller system in handling high power games will be less prevalent here.  Still Adventure! offers players some interesting powers (referred to in the game as "knacks") for characters.  They are set into 3 categories which do overlap somewhat but also maintaining their own niches.  Coming up with a character concept shouldn't be too hard for most players.  Since this is another iteration of the Storyteller system anyone who has played World of Darkness (old or new), Exalted, Scion or (perhaps obviously) other parts of the Aeon Universe should be able to hop into Adventure! with minimal additional learning.

All in all I thought this was a quality game nicely contained into one book.  The challenge nowadays is finding a copy as the non-D20 version is quite rare and rather expensive unless you can stumble upon it in a Half-Price Books like I did.  The good news is the PDF is reasonably priced and with White Wolf converting their whole catalog to Print on Demand in the future this may be available in print again.  I would rate this a 8 out of 10.

Out in PDF and Physical* copy (but physical is long OOP making it quite hard to find)

Links: DriveThruRPG

Next up: Books of Sorcery Volume 2: Black & White Treatise for Exalted (Eoris rules is slowly coming along as well but crunch takes me longer to process)